Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

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СКАЧАТЬ they had been photographed in the garden, the sighthounds at their feet.

      The Azawakhs, Femi and Ehder, greeted the funeral guests. Mitch, Dru’s driver, kept the sand-colored bitch from lunging at strangers and the blue brindle from putting his forepaws on the shoulders of friends, Keziah in particular and Omar’s fund manager, Roger. Mitch introduced the brindle, putting the accent on the last syllable. “His name is Ehder. It’s a Tuareg word. It means Eagle.” And—less patient—”Femi.”

      More people entered the Federal-Greek Revival than had the cemetery. A few more friends, family and servants. They stood on the original wide pine floor planks. The boards were washed to a light tan, flooding the rooms with their bareness, celebrating the modern Danish furniture that had been Omar’s passion. Previous owners had sold off the antiques, a story Dru had lived herself, after her father’s boat went down, as her mother struggled to keep their home. An oriental end table for groceries and electricity. Within two years, Joanna had been forced to sell the Tobias Haverford House. Dru had ransomed it back after her marriage, returning it to her mother.

      Omar had been generous.

      In their own house, he’d given her a spacious second-floor bedroom to use as she wished. Despite his unspoken censure, she’d created a studio. A Bose stereo system, a view of the harbor, luxurious Indian pillows, a Berber rug from Morocco and room to dance. In a sea chest, she collected instruments. The ‘ud, the qanun, like a zither, a nay—a reed flute—the darbukkah, the hand drum shaped like a vase, the rababah, played with a horsehair bow. The double naqqarat, kettledrums, in one corner. Silk and cotton wall-hangings, harem images. A precious miniature of her ancestor, Nudar, in a dark, possibly indigo, headdress and silver necklace.

      You’re playing at things you know nothing about, Omar had said of her singing and dancing.

      Tell me.

      He’d become silent. And she’d imagined a little boy helping to bury the bodies of his loved ones, who’d been killed by tanks. There might have been limbs detached—her imagination saw the blood and the wounds. The trauma.

      After that conversation, she had never once sung or danced while Omar was home, nor painted her skin with henna. But she had danced when he was gone, and she read even more assiduously of desert peoples and their traditions. She did this for two reasons. It was part of being a Haverford, this studying and collecting. The Nantucket museum held scores of treasures gathered from abroad by her seafaring ancestors. Tobias Haverford had brought home the dearest prize—his wife. But also, in the books she read, the academic domentaries she watched, Dru searched for Omar, for some key inside him she couldn’t reach, something to explain the contradictions. Something more fathomable than the indelible scars of war.

      She had not found it. Now she was left with the freedom to dance whenever she liked, to spend her life dancing and singing.

      She did not feel like dancing.

      But at Omar’s wake, women gathered in her studio. Dru and her mother and Keziah and hers. The two little girls. The pregnant woman, Oceania, whom Dru had coaxed from her brother’s side, to gain her trust and learn her secrets. Two of the Haverfords, the wealthy branch of the family, from California, speaking ever so often of their—and her—dead cousin, Skye.

      Someone hummed softly. Keziah picked up the mizwid, the smaller Algerian equivalent of bagpipes.

      The deepest rituals of song and dance, to honor the stages of life.

      Joanna took Oceania’s hand. “Come with me, darling.” Removing the pregnant woman from the grieving place.

      Keziah’s mother, Mary Mayhew, followed them with her eyes. The door shut. “What’s she going to do? Where’s the father? It’s so hard to give up a baby.”

      Or to raise one alone, Dru thought. As Keziah was doing. But she would choose Keziah’s path herself. In any circumstance she could imagine.

      Mary shook her head heavily. “So hard to part with one’s child.” Shivering back tears, she embraced Dru. “Oh, darling, I shouldn’t be talking about babies.”

      Mary had taught all of them, all the women, to sing and dance and paint their skin with henna. She had taught the spiritual traditions and beliefs behind these customs. Mary had learned from her grandmother, who had learned from her mother. In the 1920s, two Haverford women had traveled to North Africa, seeking their heritage; they were photographed in long skirts on camels in Egypt. The Haverfords clung to a strange past. Their tradition said women’s dance was for women, a ritual between them, part of their power. They hoarded long cotton or silk dresses from Egypt and Palestine with brilliantly embroidered bodices and elegant pleats falling from beneath the yoke, with lace collars. There were dances for all the seasons of life.

      Dru caught Keziah’s tune. She knew the Arabic words, because Mary had taught her and Dru had studied the language as an undergraduate. Too, she still remembered bits of Rashaida dialect she’d picked up as a child during those strange desert months in the Sudan. Omar had never complimented her on being the perfect hostess to Arabic men with oil interests or others from the Arab world whom he’d wooed and won and sometimes robbed.

      Omar would hate for her to mourn him this way.

      It was her way, and each cry for him was also for her father, that almost unbearable loss when she was fourteen.

      Down on her knees, angry at herself and at Omar, for the times she had thought unjustly, You have killed me, Omar. Who am I now? She sank into the rug. The numbing tide of the music took her, and she swayed. Her body knew one movement, her upper body forward and back, forth and away. Singing. Moaning.

      Joanna slipped back into the room and sat on her heels beside her daughter. Dru loved the touch of her hand, the feel of each line. Joanna had slipped easily from the Velvet Underground to the Haverford ways. Now her daughter mourned with dance, and her mother remembered another, more difficult, loss. She hoped Dru would not have to grieve with the intensity she had when Turk’s boat failed to return, after the waiting, the waiting of a fisherman’s wife. But there were too many similarities.

      The worst kind. Oh, my darling Dru.

      Oh, sweet Turk. I never meant it.

      Keri slipped to the floor with them.

      Then one Haverford cousin in Calvin Klein stockings and Chanel.

      The other in Armani.

      They swayed back and forth and Dru saw Omar’s eyes and wept for the time they’d shared a bed. Too long ago. Months and seasons since they’d embarked on the plan for a baby. Why didn’t I say no? Why didn’t I insist on something different, Omar?

      SERGIO OPENED THE DOOR, then pulled it wider. He smiled gently as Ben stepped in out of the biting wind. Sergio was whom he’d come to see, to ask a favor, to ask for clothing from a dead man’s closet. Ben explained why, as a nephew, as someone so close to Omar, and Sergio said, “I will send something to your home later today. It should cause no distress. Rather the contrary. You’re in ’Sconset?”

      “Yes. Thanks.” How well-mannered these people were. His tribe and their servants.

      The dogs were loose and found Ben. He petted Ehder, whose brown eyes begged for his heart, while Femi caught his shoelaces like a puppy. Ben listened to the ceiling and knew he would not see her.

      Better that way.

      Standing, СКАЧАТЬ